Electrical connectors provide signal connections between electronic devices using electrically-conductive contacts. It is sometimes desirable to increase data transfer through an existing connector without changing the physical dimensions (height, width, depth, mating interface, and mounting interface) of the connector. However, it is difficult to change one aspect of an electrical connector without unintentionally changing another aspect. For example, metallic crosstalk shields can be added to an electrical connector to reduce crosstalk, but the addition of shields generally lowers the impedance. At lower data transmission speeds, such at 1 to 1.25 Gigabits/sec, impedance matching does not substantially affect performance. However, as data transmission speeds increase to 10 Gigabits/sec through 40 Gigabits/sec and any discrete point there between, skew and impedance mismatches become problematic. Therefore, while crosstalk can be lowered by adding a metallic crosstalk shield to an existing electrical connector, other problems with signal integrity can be created.
What is therefore desired is an electrical connector having a shield that avoids the shortcomings of conventional shields.